The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 566: The Villainess who got tired

The first sensation was not the biting frost of the Northern Reaches, nor was it the heavy, copper-scented weight of my own exhaustion. It was the absence of everything. There was no ground to anchor my heels, no wind to pull at my hair, and no gravity to remind my bones that they belonged to the earth.I was suspended.

It was a quality of being held without hands, pinned in a medium that had no name and no resistance. When my eyes finally flickered open, they didn’t find the gray, overcast sky of Nevareth. They found a void. It was dark, yet it wasn’t empty; it possessed the terrifying, infinite depth of the space between stars, scattered with distant, lonely points of light that seemed to have been cast there by a careless hand.

The sound was still there. The mechanism. The wheels within wheels and the rhythmic, gargantuan grinding of gears that functioned behind the fabric of existence. Here, without the muffled insulation of reality, the noise was absolute. It was the heartbeat of a machine too large to comprehend.

I tried to feel my body. I was present, I could feel the pulse in my wrists and the air in my lungs, but I was weightless. The laws of the world, the ones I had spent my life mastering and breaking, simply did not apply to this coordinate.

Slowly, the static in my mind began to clear, and the memory of the North came rushing back. I remembered the soldiers, their eyes flickering with that borrowed violet flame. I remembered the three mages, the spiders I had plucked from their webs to break the spell. And then, the sound.

The tearing. The crack that ran from the sky to the mud, a fissure that only I could see.

I remembered my hand reaching out. Every survival instinct I possessed had been screaming, a raw, primal noise in the back of my brain telling me to run, to hide, to look away. I had reached anyway. I had touched the edge of the fracture, and the light had swallowed the world.

Now, I was here. I looked in every direction, up, down, and into the lateral infinities, and found nothing. No horizon. No walls. No other living soul. Just the void, the distant lights, and the tireless work of the Great Engine.

"Hello?" I cast my voice into the dark, testing the parameters of the space.

There was no echo. The void didn’t reflect the sound; it simply absorbed it, pulling the vibrations into the silence until they vanished. I was a shout in a vacuum.

The change happened gradually, then with the sudden, jarring snap of a breaking fever. The darkness around me, the very fabric of the void, began to fracture. It wasn’t the tearing I had seen in the sky; this was different. It was like a sheet of high-quality glass being struck at the center, shattering into a thousand floating shards.

The fragments hovered in the air around me, each one catching a light that had no discernible source. At first, I didn’t look closely. I was too busy trying to find a way to move, to swim through the nothingness. Then, movement caught my eye in a shard drifting to my left.

I drifted toward it, my attention locking onto the surface of the glass.

I saw her.

The woman in the glass was Eris, and yet she was a stranger. The shape of her face, the shocking shock of her white hair, those were hers. But the expression was a haunting distortion of the woman I knew. It was a mask of cold, sharp cruelty I had never seen her wear.

She stood in the center of a ruin. Stone and ash littered the ground, the specific, fine-grained ash that remains when a fire has burned with a supernatural, all-consuming heat. It was her signature. She had burned this place to the ground.

She was smiling. It was a devilish, jagged thing, the smile of a woman who had forgotten the taste of kindness so long ago that she had stopped trying to remember it. There were bodies around her, charred husks that had once been men.

What is this? I thought, my chest tightening. When is this? Is this a nightmare, or is it real?

Movement flickered at the edge of the shard. A man entered the courtyard of the ruined palace. Caelen. He held a sword that pulsed with an enchanted rhythm, a feeling that resonated even through the glass and across the void. It felt familiar to me, a phantom ache in my own palms that I couldn’t explain.

They spoke, but the glass distorted the sound, leaving their words muffled and indistinct. I didn’t need the words. I could read her face. Beneath the cruelty, I saw an exhaustion so profound it looked like a terminal illness. She looked like a person who had been fighting a war for so long she had forgotten the cause.

In Caelen, I saw only grief. He was the executioner who hated his axe.

The moment arrived. Caelen moved, his sword a streak of silver light. It found her.

My reaction was instantaneous. A physical, agonizing pain erupted in my chest, right where the blade pierced her through the glass. It wasn’t metaphorical; it was a hot, searing spike that made me gasp for air.

"Eris!" I shouted, my hands slamming against the cold surface of the fragment.

Nothing happened. I couldn’t reach through. I couldn’t stop the silver from ending her. I watched as her body began to dissolve into ash, her eyes fixed on the sky with a terrifyingly hollow relief.

The pain in my chest spread outward, a cold poison in my blood. Is this happening now? Panic flared, hot and bright. While I am trapped here, is Caelen killing her? Is she dying in the capital while I watch the replay?

I let out a wordless shout of fury, but the void swallowed it whole.

The first fragment shattered, and new ones rose to take its place, circling me like a carousel of ghosts.

I saw her standing at a window, watching a garden from the shadows of a stone corridor. In the garden, Caelen was laughing with Ophelia and a young boy, Rael. They looked like a family. They looked complete.

Eris watched them from the dark. Her face was a portrait of resentment, but beneath that was a grief that broke my heart. It was the look of a woman who knew she was staring at a life that should have been hers, but was never going to be. She looked at the boy, Rael, with eyes that held a thousand unspoken apologies.

The scene shifted. A formal dinner table was set for two, the food steaming, the wine poured. Eris waited alone. A messenger arrived, bowing low, his voice a murmur of rejection. The King consort has declined the invitation. He wouldn’t bring the boy to see her. Not again.

I watched her expression change. The fire didn’t start slowly; it erupted. The table, the cloth, the chairs, everything vanished in a roar of white heat. When the flames died down, she was standing in the ash of her own rage, her silence more terrifying than the fire.

How many times did this happen? I wondered. How many rooms did she burn because there was nowhere else to put the pain?

The fragments moved faster now. I saw her wedding day. She looked happy, a radiant, desperate hope shining on the surface of her face. If I can make him my husband, I can make him love me. Eventually. I can make this real.

But beside her, Caelen looked like a man who had agreed to a treaty he despised. At the reception, I saw him with Ophelia, their heads bent together, their connection an open wound in the middle of the room. Eris watched them from across the hall, and I saw her face close. The hope from the ceremony died in an instant, replaced by a blank, icy distance.

This is where the armor started, I realized. The control. The distance. It started on her wedding day.

I saw her alone in a destroyed room, sitting on the floor amidst the charred remains of her life, crying with a jagged, heaving sound that had been held back for years. I felt the specific grief of arriving too late, the agony of wanting to protect someone from a past you weren’t even a part of.

Finally, a fragment showed a garden in Solmire. Eris was alone, looking down at her own hands. Beneath her skin, a faint, rhythmic light was beginning to pulse. The seal. It was the first time it had truly made itself known. Her expression wasn’t one of fear; it was a dawning, terrible recognition. She had been carrying a god inside her her entire life, and she was only just beginning to realize the cost.

The fragments dissolved, the glass turning back into the dark mist of the void. The stars and the mechanical ticking returned, leaving me in a silence that felt heavier than before.

I sat with the weight of it. I had seen her more completely than she had ever allowed me to see her in the light. I knew the shape of her scars, the source of her fires, and the exact moment her heart had turned to stone to survive.

What was that? I whispered. What did I just watch?

"You should not be here."